Tag: Kenai

When I was 22, I spent a summer in Kenai, Alaska, as a palletizer in a salmon canning factory. Ron and I had known each other for 2 years. We arrived in Kenai on the summer solstice at sunset after hitchhiking from Santa Fe by way of Chicago. We pitched our tent on the bluff overlooking the mouth of the Kenai River. That first night we were broke, and an Irish traveler made us tea at his campfire. Exhausted, we lay our heads down in our sleeping bags, but before we closed our eyes, the sun was rising again.

The way to get a job in the warehouse as opposed to gutting fish on the line was to procure a couple pair of rubber boots and show up at the warehouse doors and make friends. Ron knew this from working in Kenai in past summers. Within a few days we had jobs at $7 an hour with time-and-a-half for overtime and were the envy of our camp mates for coming home from 14 hour shifts not smelling like fish.

I was a small girl, so moving the totes full of canned salmon across the warehouse floor was an exercise in overcoming inertia. A modest estimate is that each tote weighed 500 lbs. We rolled totes up to the palletizing tables where we would layer the cans, separated by cardboard, onto a pallet and shrink wrap the tower in an oven for shipping.

I was pulling a tote up to the table and looking behind me to get the positioning right when someone took pity on me and decided to help. They pushed the tote over my foot. My 5th metatarsal was broken and my big toenail was hanging halfway off. The doctor at the clinic decided that the best thing to do was to remove the entire toenail. No amount of novocaine could numb the pain of her forceps.

The fiberglass cast on my leg went all the way up to my knee and I spent several days at the Kenai library where I discovered the work of Ursula K. LeGuin. To keep the infection away, I had to soak my toe in Epsom salts. I lay face down on a couple pallets in my tent and aimed my toe in a dixie cup of salted water. The guys on the bluff shook their heads: It would have just fallen off eventually, they mused. My big toenail did grow back in, but it’s always been crooked and gnarly.

After our six weeks in the canning factory, we flew to Hawaii and spent three weeks on the island of Kauai. And even though I couldn’t swim in the ocean, the vacation was memorable. Every night we made love on the beach until it started to rain, when we’d run into our tent. We got a car through “Rent-A-Wreck” and drove around the island with 5 stoplights total. We ate blowfish, met our Kenai friends, I had my cast removed.

When our vacation was over, Ron had a ticket back to Santa Fe and I was headed to San Francisco to spend a year working before I went back to college. We said goodbye, wondering why we were leaving each other when it felt like we had just had a honeymoon.

Ron didn’t know it, but after we parted, I turned the corner and snuck back to watch him. I wondered if he would be crying, or meeting someone new, or happy to be free, or staring into space in despair. In fact, he was repacking his backpack. I watched him as he methodically organized and folded his worn clothes with care, making piles, sorting, filling a trash can, shaking the sand out of shorts.

Almost 30 years later, he still sorts things methodically, and my big toenail is still crooked and warped.